4.5 Stars
Wow. Let me say I had low expectations going into this, but I was so wrong. Backstory: I'm not a fan of milk & honey. It's not a style I enjoy at all, and the entire book just felt too Tumblr and cheesy and simplistic. this blew me away. it's so different, fresh, and jaw-dropping.
it’s interesting to see how her writing has grown and evolved. there are very few short poems (unlike m&h), which i was thankful for, because in m&h it seemed like she would just write sentences with skips in it, then label them poetry, and i really hated that style. however, this utilized a lot of longer poems and metaphor and personification of nature, and although it’s still not my favorite style, it’s gotten so much better.
This book was just so much more personal. m&h felt like a ton of blanket statements and tumblr posts, but this one had quotes that actually made me sit back and go “whoa.”
“i even tried to bury myself alive
but the dirt recoiled
you have already rotted it said
there is nothing left for me to do
- self-hate”
AMAZING.
This book adds on an entire section about immigration and refugees, and I thought it was new and powerful as opposed to only talking about feminism, the body, and self-love. also, brown girls NEED to pick up this book. there is so much positivity and messages about acceptance of your skin.
i will say, if you decide to pick this up, don't give up hope until you reach part 2. The whole first part seems like it was a step back from milk & honey? milk and honey was so feminist and focused on recovery and self-love and some of the poems in the first part were like “TELL ME I’M PRETTY I NEED VALIDATION” and stuff like that and I was like ??????? It started out really weak but definitely got better.
Lastly, another thing I wasn’t a huge fan of is none of her poems use punctuation. She had some longer poems unlike anything she had in m&h, but most of those just employed really long-winded run-on sentences and I wasn’t a huge fan of that style. Because of that, it was hard to tell sometimes when one poem ended and another begun because none were punctuated, some didn’t have titles, some were just one sentence, etc.
Regardless, I'm sorta speechless because I expected to hate this and I actually enjoyed it so much. Several of the poems gave me chills. If you gave up hope after milk & honey, definitely think about trying this from a library or something because it is a MAJOR improvement and I think its messages are valuable, and nothing about this feels like a regurgitation of a Tumblr post.